The Museum

My pal Sharon Burian sent me some information on the project she just completed:

I want to alert you to a short film that I recently worked on that was one of the top ten finalists for the Coca-Cola Refreshing Filmmaker Award for 2008. Go to 2008 finalists and it’s called The Museum. Actually, even though it’s still listed as a finalist, it WON and will screen in 30,000 theaters across the country!!!

Austin Formato, the director, is supposed to receive the award in the middle of March and my guess is they won’t update the site until then, but I figured I would give you a heads up for Cartoon Brew.

The film was made by all UCLA film students and animators. I animated/rotoscoped the entire Warhol painting sequence at the end. Will Kim did the Degas, James Suhr and I both worked on the animation of the Van Gogh (someone else painted the background and her name escapes me), and Donna Segal animated the Picasso. It was a very positive experience all around and I’m so excited that it’s going to screen in theaters!

Congrats to director Formato and his team. To see the short click here.

Yay, James Suhr! Congrats to the team that produced this, but I’ve worked closely with James on a couple projects at Nickelodeon, and he is a great talent at the beginnings of what looks like a very fruitful career. He can board, animate, paint–check out his blog, too!

Allthough I had bad vibes with rotoscoped painting animations ever since those Wish-Bone dressing commercials came out in the 90’s, the reason I like this is because it has a good plot structure, like the Ted E.
cartoon “Sunshine Makers” and the orginial “Got Milk?” commercials for the California Milk Processor Board (the ones that used the milk deprivation strategy.).

But if it was longer and had cartoonish violence, then it would be a definite remincicense of days where you paid a nickle to see multiple films, plus the usual trailers and commercials.

Hey thanks Big D. for the warm plug! Thank you both Jerry and Sharon for posting info about this. It so cool to be mentioned on Cartoon Brew and to be mentioned among great friends and colleages. Woooooo!